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Hillsboro, Oregon
Miriam & Hubert Stebbins, being an inspiration and showing us that…
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4 x 6 postcard reflecting your environmental concerns and ideas towards positive change
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Frances Lancaster knows necessity is the mother of invention, but
desire is the father of ingenuity…
Recycling isn’t new. My family believes that stretching the dollar is motivation for creativity, and that desire stimulates ingenuity. From this philosophy, I was taught to reuse things at a young age and have called upon this wisdom throughout my life.
When I was a child, I had a Shirley Temple doll. She was made of wood composite and painted flesh color. Her legs and arms moved as well as her head, and her eyes opened and shut and had real eyelashes. She had a wig sewn with real hair. This doll came from a rummage sale; my grandmother who was an artist, repaired her, sewed clothes for her, and gave her to me, her only granddaughter, as a gift. I loved playing with this doll and fixing her hair. In fact, I still have her, 60 years later.
My grandmother was on a very limited budget, but that didn’t stop her from creating beautiful things. She frequented rummage sales looking for men’s wool pants in order to make braided rugs. The material was cut into strips and then sewn by hand and fashioned into beautiful dining room sized rugs. As a youngster, I remember looking at her hands and marveling at her gnarled fingers, the result of years of braiding rugs by hand from materials that might otherwise be thrown away.
My dad became the ultimate recycler; after a financial reversal, he began taking advantage of garage sales to supplement his income. He was an avid gardener with a beautiful flower garden, and he began buying gardening items like lawn mowers and pruning shears. He had a knack for making things look like new and repaired anything that wasn’t working properly. He sold these “like new” items to a second hand store for other’s reuse. His effort served three purposes: It brought in extra cash, gave him worth and filled his days, and kept landfills from overflowing with items that had not been entirely used up.
As an adult, my husband and I purchased a vacation home near Mount St. Helens that we could enjoy with our children. The home was incomplete and almost everything needed to be finished on the inside. We used second hand items to complete the home, including bedding, furniture, kitchenware, linens, artwork, and recreational clothing, with items that had been previously owned.
As each of us becomes more aware of our earth’s resources and how we are using them up, we will start to realize that everything we acquire doesn’t have to be brand new. We can think twice, “save a tree,” reuse, recycle, recommit, and let our desires for a sustainable environment be our ingenuity.
p.o. box 1771 | hillsboro oregon 97123
503.681.2527